Te Hiku Sports Centre manager Mark Osborne and facility manager Haidee Switzer say the first six months of the centre’s operation was a huge success, with more than 60,000 individual visits.
Te Hiku Sports Centre manager Mark Osborne and facility manager Haidee Switzer say the first six months of the centre’s operation was a huge success, with more than 60,000 individual visits.
The $11.5 million sports hub, on State Highway One, south of the town, was formally opened last June after first being mooted nearly 30 years ago. The hub was supported by $3.6m from the Provincial Growth Fund to build an indoor aquatic and fitness centre.
The centre has swimming pools, a gym, sports fields, a cricket wicket and netball courts, among its drug- and alcohol-free facilities. There are a variety of sporting codes set to use it, including rugby, league, football, netball, cricket and hockey.
Te Hiku Sports Hub manager Mark Osborne said the first six months to the end of December was a huge success story for the centre, with more than 60,000 individual uses of its facilities.
The Te Hiku Sports Centre was opened with a lot of fanfare and hope last June, and it’s proven to be a big success.
‘‘That’s around 9,000 visits a week, which is huge, and shows just how valuable and needed this facility was,’’ Osborne said.
He said that’s a mix of members and casual visitors, with many people returning again and again to make use of the many facilities.
Osborne said the Swim Tangaroa swim school was popular, with more than 300 people learning to swim through it. With the Far North surrounded by coastline - and having high drowning rates - getting as many people as possible to learn to swim was vital, he said.
“That is fantastic for water safety to have so many more people learn to swim here. It’s very important for the Far North to have it’s people able to swim and with many schools finding it challenging to run their own pools, we have filled that gap, and we have had a lot of support from schools.
Not surprisingly, the centre was busier when the weather wasn’t the best.
“When the weather’s good everybody goes to the beach or outdoors, but when it’s not so good, we are a good place to visit and spend some time at. We provide plenty to do on those not-so-good days,” Osborne said.
“We’re also getting various groups of people with particular challenges coming in to use the facilities and it’s great to see so much diversity of people using the centre - we’ve had all ages, ethnicities and abilities coming in.”
Te Hiku Sports Centre project manager Mark Osborne reckons there won’t be many places in the world that welcomes people in three languages - English, te reo Māori and Dalmatian.
Osborne said that diversity of users was probably the number one positive he had got from the first six months.
Facility manager Haidee Switzer echoed that, saying she was blown away by the number of different types of people using the centre.
“It’s just been wonderful to see so many people coming in to use the centre, from right across the district. Tomorrow we’ve got a group from Te Kao [65km away] that come every week with kuia and kaumātua. It started with a van, but it’s proven so popular they may need a bigger bus now,” Switzer said.
“And then they go into town for a coffee, so that brings more people into Kaitāia.”
The centre also had an arrangement with Northland Rugby League that’s linked to the One NZ Warriors that allows talented up-and-coming league players from the Far North to train at the facility so they do not have to go elsewhere to follow their dreams.
“It means our young people can stay up here to train and the Warriors will bring some players up here every year too.”
Osborne said one big challenge had been rising power costs, which had almost doubled since the centre opened.
“Unfortunately we opened right at the time when wholesale electricity prices were really rising fast and the price of power really shot up,” he said.
“We had budgeted for about $200,000 a year for power, but it’s now more like $400,000, so it’s pretty much doubled. That’s a bit of a challenge, but we’ve had a lot of support from some of our funders and Top Energy has been very supportive of us.”
Osborne said the centre trust had explored a number of other power options before opening, including solar power and a pellet burner, but they had been ruled due to cost and practicality.
“The issue is our power use is 24/7 and not just limited to daytime high use so we need that constant supply. A solar option would have cost about $2 million and only provide about a third of what we needed so we would have still needed to use the national grid.”
He said keeping the ambient air temperature in the facility between 25C and 27C was the main power use, far more than heating the pool, and the facility had tweaked the time replacing all the air to reduce power use and was aware of the peak usage times.
He said another issue was that the floor could be slippery at times and some people had slipped on the surface.
To prevent this the facility had used matting on the areas at risk and high-traffic spots, and increased cleaning around those spots. Signs warning of the slip danger had also been put up more prominently.
“It’s been a really good first six months and we’re looking forward to this facility expanding further and providing a great service to people in the Far North for many years to come.”
